Chapter 21
The last morning came too fast, the way last mornings did.
Olivia found her mother in the herb beds at first light, on her knees in the dirt in her traveling clothes, doing violence to a rosemary bush that had done nothing to deserve it.
“Ye’re leavin’ in an hour.”
“Aye,” said Elspeth, not looking up. “This will want cuttin’ back before the frost, and there’s nae a soul in this castle that kens it, and I’ll nae leave it to die out of spite.
” She sat back on her heels and looked at her ruined hands.
“There. Now I have somethin’ to do with meself besides weeping. ”
Olivia knelt down in the dirt beside her in her good gown and did not care.
They worked a while in silence. It was easier that way. It had always been easier that way with her mother, who had never once needed to fill a quiet.
“He’s nae what I expected,” Elspeth said eventually.
“Nay.”
“I wanted to hate him.” She said it plainly, the way she said everything.
“I wanted to hate him for a good six months. I lay awake wantin’ it.
And then I came here, and I watched him kill a man for puttin’ his hands on ye, and I watched him carry ye up those stairs like ye were made of glass, and I found I couldnae get the hatred to sit right inside of me any longer.
” She snapped a dead stem. “I daenae ken what to do with that, lass. I’ve nae worked it out yet, but I’ll nae lie to ye about it. ”
“It doesnae make it all right. What he did.”
“Nay,” her mother agreed. “It doesnae. Two things can be true. That’s the whole trouble with bein’ alive.
” She turned and tucked a loose red curl behind Olivia’s ear with a dirty hand.
“Are ye safe here? That’s all I’m askin’.
Ye can lie to me if ye like. Ye’ve always been a terrible liar, but ye can try. ”
“I’m safe,” Olivia said. “I daenae ken if I’m anythin’ else, but I’m safe.”
“Aye.” Elspeth studied her a moment longer. “Well, that’s more than I had at yer age.”
The cart was loaded, and the horses were stamping. Anne stood on the mounting block, adjusting her spectacles for the fourth time in as many minutes, which was her entire vocabulary of grief.
“Write,” she said.
“I’ll write.”
“The true things, mind.”
“God, ye sound like me maither.”
“Yer maither,” said Anne, “is the only person in this glen with any sense, and I’ll thank ye nae to insult us both.
” She hugged Olivia hard enough to crack a rib and spoke into her hair quick and low, so nobody else could catch it.
“He looks at ye like a man lookin’ at a window in a burnin’ house, Olivia.
I’ve been watchin’ him the whole week. Ye’ve nae seen it because ye’re too busy bein’ furious, but I have. ”
“Anne—”
“I’m only sayin’ I’ve seen it.” She let go, pushed her spectacles up her nose, and climbed into the cart.
And then it was her mother, in the courtyard, with the whole household turned out and Maisie holding the baby not ten feet away.
Olivia stood with her mother’s hands in her own. Rosie was ten feet from them, chewing on a fistful of Maisie’s shawl, with her Blythe-blue eyes and her fat starfish hands.
Elspeth had not once asked whose child she was because Elspeth did not ask questions like that. Because Elspeth had been raised to believe that a great house had children in it and that it was nobody’s business but the house’s.
Tell her.
The words came up in Olivia’s throat like something she had swallowed wrong.
Tell her. That is Magnus’s daughter. That is yer grandchild, standin’ ten feet from ye in an enemy’s arms, with yer husband’s eyes in her head, and she is the only piece of him left in all the world, and ye are about to ride away from her.
But then she would have to say the rest of it.
And I cannae give ye the one without the other. I cannae give ye a grandchild without givin’ ye what Magnus did to get her.
Her mother’s face, upturned in the cold morning. Gentle. Grieving. Still, after everything, believing that things fell the way they fell for a reason. Still believing her son had died a soldier’s death in a stupid old war.
It would kill her. Not quickly. It would go into her like a splinter, and it would work its way in for years.
“Olivia?” Elspeth was frowning. “Lass, ye’ve gone pale. What is it?”
Olivia looked at the baby, then at her mother.
“Nothin’,” she said. “The cold. It’s only the cold.”
She kissed her mother, and she helped her into the cart, and she stood in the courtyard and waved until the road took them round the shoulder of the hill.
And it was, without any question, the worst thing she had ever done.
They were gone, and Olivia was alone in a castle full of folk who hated her.
She felt it within the hour, the shift in the air. It had been there before, the wary measuring coldness of the Cairn folk, but it had thawed a little in the days since the wedding, since their Laird had carried her up the stairs in his arms. Now it had come back twofold and frozen hard.
She understood the why of it when she passed two maids in the lower corridor, and they fell silent as a slammed door, and the elder of them looked Olivia full in the face with open dislike before bobbing a curtsey so shallow it was almost an insult.
“Is somethin’ the matter?” Olivia asked, because she had never once in her life been able to leave well enough alone.
“Nay, me Lady.” The word came out sour. “Only, the Laird has sent away Brigid MacKee this mornin’.
For five years she has healed this clan, birthed our weans, closed our dead’s eyes.
And she is put out on the road like a beggar, on account of—” The maid’s eyes flicked over her.
“Well, on account of nothin’ that’s any of me business, I am sure. ”
“Brigid MacKee insulted me,” Olivia said evenly. “The Laird made his own choice.”
“Aye, he did.” The maid’s chin lifted. “He’s made a deal of strange choices of late. Ever since a Blythe came under this roof.” She curtseyed again, that same shallow, insolent dip. “Ye will forgive me, me Lady. I’ve work to do. Some of us are still left to do ours.”
And then she was gone, her companion at her heels, leaving Olivia alone in the cold corridor, with the words hanging unspoken and unmistakable in the air behind them.
So that’s how it is, then. I told him. I stood in that room and told him plainly what it would cost, and he didnae hear a word of it because he was too busy bein’ good to me.
That’s the joke of it. He’ll ruin me with kindness and never ken he’s done it. There was never goin’ to be any winnin’ here.
She did not go down for the noon meal. She could not stomach the hall, the measuring eyes, the silence that would fall and rise around her like a tide.
She took herself up to the nursery instead, where she could find the only two souls in all of Cairn who loved her unconditionally, and sat down on the floor with Rosie crawling determined circles around her and Tattie sprawled in a vast warm heap across her feet.
She let the bairn and the beast comfort her, for they did not care a whit whose daughter she was.
That was where Kate found her an hour later. She entered quietly, took everything in at a glance, sisterly to the bone, and gently lowered herself beside Olivia without saying a word. For a while, the two of them just sat there, watching the baby in silence.
“They’re cruel to ye,” Kate said at last. It was not a question.
“They have cause.” Olivia’s voice was flat. “I am the enemy. I’ve always been the enemy. I let meself forget it for a day or two, that’s all. The maids have only reminded me.”
“Aye, well, they’re cruel to me as well, in their own way.
” Kate turned her face to the thin sun that came through the curtains.
“They’re kind to me face, which is a deal worse.
They speak slowly. They ask me how I’m feelin’ in that voice folk use with the dyin’ and the daft.
I’d rather a slammed door and a plain insult if I’m being honest with ye.
At least a plain insult means somebody thinks ye’re still there to hear it. ”
Olivia looked at her properly then. And she was ashamed.
“I’ve done that,” she said. “Have I nae? The voice.”
“Nay,” Kate said at once. “Nay, ye never have. That’s the whole reason I’m sittin’ here with ye and nae starin’ at a wall, Olivia.
Ye came into me room, and ye asked me if yer gown sat well.
” Her mouth twitched. “Ye’re the only soul in this castle that’s ever wanted somethin’ from me.
Everyone else only wants to give me things. ”
The dog put his enormous head in Kate’s lap and sighed, and she laid a thin hand on it.
“How are ye?” Olivia asked. “Truly. Nae the slow voice. Ye’re out of the chair, and ye’re eatin’, and ye held her. But that’s what ye’re doin’. It isnae how ye are.”
Kate was quiet for a long moment.
“Tired,” she said. “Tired in me bones, and it doesnae shift, nay matter how I sleep. Me arm aches when the weather turns, and I’m told it always will.”
She watched the baby on the rug. “I look at her, and some days I’m so full of love for her that I can scarcely breathe around it, and other days I look at her and I see him, and I have to go out of the room.
And I hate meself for it every single time.
” She said it evenly, which was somehow worse than if she had wept.
“That’s how I am. Ye’re the first person who’s asked me and meant it, so ye may as well have the true answer. ”
“Kate—”
“Daenae.” A small shake of her head. “Daenae be kind about it. I’ll come apart, and I’ve a wee one to feed.”
They sat.
“Now,” Kate said after a while, “ask me the thing ye actually want to ask me. Ye’ve been circlin’ it since we sat down, and it’s makin’ me dizzy.”
Olivia laughed wetly and rubbed at her face with her sleeve.
“Do ye think he feels it too?” she asked.
“Yer braither. Under all his fine words about me bein’ his wife.
Do ye think, when he looks at me, he sees what they see?
A Blythe. Me faither’s daughter. The enemy he’s saddled with for the sake of a truce.
” Her voice dropped. “He’s kind to me. But kindness isnae the same as—I daenae even ken what it’s the same as. Forget it. Forget I asked.”
“Ye shouldnae be askin’ it of anyone but me, wife.” Ragnall’s voice came from the door.
Olivia lifted her head to find him standing in the doorway with one shoulder against the frame. She had no idea how long he had been there or how much he had heard. His face was unreadable in the dim nursery light, and her heart pounded up into her throat.
Kate rose at once, gathering up the baby and a fistful of the dog’s scruff, her eyes bright with what might have been hope or warning.
“I will take these two down for their dinner,” she said, and was gone before Olivia could beg her to stay, drawing the door nearly shut at her back.
And then Olivia was alone with her husband, with the question she had not quite dared to ask hanging raw in the air between them, and he was looking at her in a way she could not name, and could not bear, and could not look away from.